A Great Start to the Space Year

2018 was a great year for space, but it was barely a few days into 2019 and three amazing achievements in space have happened. We had new Horizons studying the furthest object studied in space, the Chinese space agency landing a rover on the far side of the Moon, and OSIRIS-REx mission reached bennu.

New Horizons

By far the biggest news in the space sector recently, New Horizons officially flew by object 2014 MU69, the outermost close encounter of any Solar System object. Launching in 2016, New Horizons was a mission designed to help us understand the worlds at the edge of our Solar System. The biggest part of the mission was in 2015 when it made the first reconnaissance of the dwarf planet Pluto, producing some amazing photos. After that it kept venturing out into the Kuiper Belt to study more mysterious objects. The spacecraft is helping us to understand the basic questions about the surface properties, interior makeup, geology and atmosphere of the bodies it passes. The exploration of the Kuiper belt is one of the big priorities in planetary science currently. New Horizons fits into this plan, by seeing how Pluto and its Moons “fit in” to the other objects in the Solar System. It has already aided in finding four previously unknown Moons of Pluto, and studied the known Moon Charon in much more detail.

An artistic impression of what New Horizons looked like when it passed Pluto and Charon. Credit: NASA Goddard Media Studios.

New Horizons was designed, built and is operated by The John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado is the principal investigator. It flew by the Kuiper belt object 2014 MU69 barely a few hours into the new year at 05:33 UTC on January 1st 2019. The flyby technically ends on January 9th, where it switches from 3-axis mode to spin mode. This is the beginning of the downlink phase which could run for around 18 months! This is because it is so far away, the frequency (and therefore the data rate) is much lower than if the spacecraft was close. The current extended mission is planned to last until April 30th, 2021. If still operational there may be a new extended mission, but it has very limited fuel at about 11kg. The craft could in theory visit another Kuiper Belt object. If it lasts until the mid 2030’s it will join Voyager 2 in the Heliosphere, but based on the RTG it may run out about then.

Chang-E4

On January 3rd 2019 at 02:26 UTC China’s Chang’e-4 spacecraft successfully landed on the far side of the Moon. The first ever soft landing on the far side of the Moon, up until this point we only has remotely sensed images. The target of the spacecraft was the Von Kármán crater, located within the South Pole-Aitken basin. This is where an ancient lunar impact may have exposed some of the Moon’s mantle. The plan is to study this region directly with the rover and the lander. It also allows for a close up look at the far side of the Moon, which could be a perfect place for science applications such as radio astronomy. As there is no direct line of sight to the far side of the Moon they need a relay satellite. The satellite that China launched is the Queqiao relay satellite, launched in May 2018.

An image of the rover similar to the Chang’e-3’s rover. Credit: CNSA.

OSIRIS-Rex

Coming into the new year, on December 31st OSIRIS-REx entered orbit around Bennu. The orbit is at around 1.75 km (just over a mile), and is the place it will be doing an extensive remote sensing campaign. 101955 Bennu, or 1999 RQ36, is a carbonaceous asteroid in the Apollo group. Discovered in 1999, it has a 1 in 2700 chance of impacting Earth between 2175 and 2199. The name Bennu references the Egyptian mythological bird associated with the sun, creation and rebirth. The OSIRIS-REx mission is a sample return mission to the asteroid Bennu. Its goal is to obtain a sample of at least 60g and then bring that sample back to Earth for scientific study. The aim is to help scientists to learn about the formation and evolution of Solar System in its initial stages of planet formation and the source of organic compounds that eventually lead to life. If the mission is successful on September 24th 2023 it will be the first US spacecraft to return samples from an asteroid.

Asteroid Bennu, imaged by the OSIRIS-REx probe (3 December 2018). Credit: NASA/ Goddard/ University of Arizona.

Thank you for reading, take a look at my other posts if you are interested in space, electronics, or military history. If you are interested, follow me on Twitter to get updates on projects I am currently working on. Most of all, thank you for taking the time to read my posts this year! So all have a Happy New Year, and here’s to a great 2019 in space!